Performance Settings

[zerocrack01]

Which settings are okay to increase to the max and which ones i must change with caution? Benchmarking is quite a hasle when you do not know if the game engine bottlenecks our your hardware. I know that the SB wont do much more than 60FPS.

Ryzen 5 7600x
16GB RAM
RX6950xt 16GB

[DK-DDAM]

you could disable high detail tracks.. that will reduce the poly count drastically to the rubber band, that is on most of the old models.

[Captain_Colossus]

graphics settings will interact with one another so that you will find there isn't a single setting which objectively satisfies your criteria for acceptable frame rates. consider:  the visible draw distance - which is not set in the graphics options but is set in the mission editor- might cripple performance at 18 km viewing area regardless of any other setting. ground cover settings likewise have been known to tax machine resources at higher settings, but won't have as much efect in a scenario where the visibilty is set to under 1 km, or in an urbanized environment (although that initself will introduce heavy calculations for a large, detailed city) - and this doesn't take into account yet your display resolution, which goes without saying will impact perfo brmance depending on how you would scale that (some users may prefer the trade of between higher resolutions and less anti-aliasing, others might go the other way). in sum, if your machine is somewhat older and framerates tend to be impacted, then perhaps a good rule of thumb is to adjust per the type of scenario you expect. generally though urbanized maps tend to have the nost impact before heavily forrested maps, ground clutter is also a setting to keep an eye on, but scenario view distance will modulate either one of these and will be perhaps one of the most influential settings which affects all other settings but for shadow mapping (which doesnt render visible shadows very far regardless) or the size of celestial objects (which is rather negligible as far as i estimate)

[Ssnake]

The User's Manual has a section about performance optimization. The relevant factors are roughly sorted in the order of influence on the framerate. There is no fixed order that fits for all hardware combinations, however.

[Ssnake]

A high slider setting for ground clutter will always tax the framerate, even at lower visibility distances. Of course 10km visibility will be more taxing than 1km, but not by a factor of 100. That's why there are levels of detail.

[Captain_Colossus]

my point wasnt that ground clutter would not affect performance with low visibilty, but that low visibility would mean that there are less visible 'other than ground clutter' objects or terrain features rendered happening concurrently; in other words few if any of these settings happen on their own, they coincide and interact with one another, i.e.,  resolution and antialising options in and of themselves make no sense without the environmemt being rendered- which also depends on the details of the environment rendered as determined by the sliders and/or checkboxes

[Ssnake]

32 minutes ago, Captain_Colossus said:

my point wasnt that ground clutter would not affect performance with low visibilty,

 

 

Yes. Ground clutter objects get rendered out to just about 200m at 100% slider setting. At that setting there's a gazillion of them already, and their number won't increase whether your visibility is 300m, 3,000, or 13,000 - since they aren't rendered at those distances. Of course, then other things come into view that will eventually reduce the framerate even further.

 

Personally, I usually keep the ground cover slider at around 20%. Looks "nice enough" for my tastes, gives me a clue about the type of terrain, doesn't cost much performance. I keep the "General" ground detail at 80...100% because I don't want to notice "hill popping" and modern GPUs can handle the additional poly load. Road rendering is potentially costly, but also very noticeable if it's too low, so I guess my pain threshold is around slider setting 4 - YMMV. I tend to reduce the high detail tracks to where I can still see them on my tracked wingman (ca. 50m distance), but not more. The rest, for me, doesn't affect performance much. I'd rather sacrifice some detail for a framerate that stays in the 50+ range under most conditions.

 

 

[Captain_Colossus]

that makes sense- although i have different preferences, i understand what you mean which really was my point from the beginning; an objective answer to the question becomes a little more personal and subjective when you examine what you are answering, because it usually means a tradeoff on personal preferences: the reduction of a slider will free up resources to dial up another- or conversely, to scale up one resource may need adjusting to turn down another since it is impacting the gameplay experience negatively depending on tastes

[Captain_Colossus]

my ideal configuration with hardware i have is a scenario with max visibility range at 6km, which plays reasonably fast, has nice grass details extended out far so as not to look too artificially barren, with lower rez screen resolution (sometimes as low as 1024 x 768 but no lower) midrange AA level and all other details maximized (shadows, high tracks, ground details), i'm willing to put up with lower screen resolutions and a max 6km viewing distance with great ground detail- thereby giving graphics which can reasonably look like the natural world but not playing too slow. i have a desktop from 2019 which does this for most scenarios i run that aren't too urbanized, i'm not a laptop user which is a harder hill to climb. it also produces better looking screenshots for the album than the purely 'performance' oriented configuration

[zerocrack01]

12 hours ago, DK-DDAM said:

you could disable high detail tracks.. that will reduce the poly count drastically to the rubber band, that is on most of the old models.

Thanks for the advise!

11 hours ago, Captain_Colossus said:

graphics settings will interact with one another so that you will find there isn't a single setting which objectively satisfies your criteria for acceptable frame rates. consider:  the visible draw distance - which is not set in the graphics options but is set in the mission editor- might cripple performance at 18 km viewing area regardless of any other setting. ground cover settings likewise have been known to tax machine resources at higher settings, but won't have as much efect in a scenario where the visibilty is set to under 1 km, or in an urbanized environment (although that initself will introduce heavy calculations for a large, detailed city) - and this doesn't take into account yet your display resolution, which goes without saying will impact perfo brmance depending on how you would scale that (some users may prefer the trade of between higher resolutions and less anti-aliasing, others might go the other way). in sum, if your machine is somewhat older and framerates tend to be impacted, then perhaps a good rule of thumb is to adjust per the type of scenario you expect. generally though urbanized maps tend to have the nost impact before heavily forrested maps, ground clutter is also a setting to keep an eye on, but scenario view distance will modulate either one of these and will be perhaps one of the most influential settings which affects all other settings but for shadow mapping (which doesnt render visible shadows very far regardless) or the size of celestial objects (which is rather negligible as far as i estimate)

I play with 2k and 4xMSAA that's usually my sweetspot. Maybe adjust aa, but i never every want to lower native resolution, which is 2k.

7 hours ago, Ssnake said:

 

 

Yes. Ground clutter objects get rendered out to just about 200m at 100% slider setting. At that setting there's a gazillion of them already, and their number won't increase whether your visibility is 300m, 3,000, or 13,000 - since they aren't rendered at those distances. Of course, then other things come into view that will eventually reduce the framerate even further.

 

Personally, I usually keep the ground cover slider at around 20%. Looks "nice enough" for my tastes, gives me a clue about the type of terrain, doesn't cost much performance. I keep the "General" ground detail at 80...100% because I don't want to notice "hill popping" and modern GPUs can handle the additional poly load. Road rendering is potentially costly, but also very noticeable if it's too low, so I guess my pain threshold is around slider setting 4 - YMMV. I tend to reduce the high detail tracks to where I can still see them on my tracked wingman (ca. 50m distance), but not more. The rest, for me, doesn't affect performance much. I'd rather sacrifice some detail for a framerate that stays in the 50+ range under most conditions.

 

 

Good advise, I try to keep it low as well then, because I know that you have a quite beefy system.

[Ssnake]

With Alt+F12 showing the framerate you can observe the effects of the different sliders directly.

And no, my system wssn't that beefy. Until recently, a GTX980. Yes, it's changed sincase lat summer, but my recommendatios above are still based on the old system.

[zerocrack01]

54 minutes ago, Ssnake said:

With Alt+F12 showing the framerate you can observe the effects of the different sliders directly.

And no, my system wssn't that beefy. Until recently, a GTX980. Yes, it's changed sincase lat summer, but my recommendatios above are still based on the old system.

Ah, in the case, my memory failed me 😅 Still, ground cover seem to have quite the impact, even on newer systems.

[Oubaas]

I just turned everything up to maximum, then watched the frame rate for a while. It stayed right around 60 FPS, give or take (58-65 FPS, depending), so I said, "Good enough for me!" and left it that way. Everything looks nice.

 

I have a decent machine, but it's not some awe-inspiring gaming monster. Just a good, mid-range machine with enough grunt to get most things done.

[iamfritz]

On 2/13/2023 at 12:49 PM, Ssnake said:

A high slider setting for ground clutter will always tax the framerate, even at lower visibility distances. Of course 10km visibility will be more taxing than 1km, but not by a factor of 100. That's why there are levels of detail.

But 10km is awesome! On my PC any higher than 11 km and hills and forests flash.

[Ssnake]

Yes, it's a known engine limitation. On my machines the problem starts with 14km+ (up to this point I thought this was universal, seems like it isn't). With version 5 we expect to eliminate these quirks.

[zerocrack01]

On 2/14/2023 at 11:51 AM, Oubaas said:

I just turned everything up to maximum, then watched the frame rate for a while. It stayed right around 60 FPS, give or take (58-65 FPS, depending), so I said, "Good enough for me!" and left it that way. Everything looks nice.

 

I have a decent machine, but it's not some awe-inspiring gaming monster. Just a good, mid-range machine with enough grunt to get most things done.

What resolution and aa do you use?

 

When I max out every thing it stays at 60 FPS when nothing is going on. In small battles around 45 FPS and when extremely busy not less than 30FPS. I think it is not bad for what we have right know. Maybe 1080p or lower would give it a huge boost but this is a no go for me and more a engine limitation. My junky RX6950xt should handle 2k or even 4k with no difficulties, under normal circumstances.

[Oubaas]

On 2/24/2023 at 12:42 AM, zerocrack01 said:

What resolution and aa do you use?

 

When I max out every thing it stays at 60 FPS when nothing is going on. In small battles around 45 FPS and when extremely busy not less than 30FPS. I think it is not bad for what we have right know. Maybe 1080p or lower would give it a huge boost but this is a no go for me and more a engine limitation. My junky RX6950xt should handle 2k or even 4k with no difficulties, under normal circumstances.

 

I'm running at 2560x1440, with 8X Supersampling.

[zerocrack01]

1 hour ago, Oubaas said:

 

I'm running at 2560x1440, with 8X Supersampling.

Is ingame aa supersampling or do you use driver options for that?